Officers investigate after mother found pushing Maryland boy's body in swing

http://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/may/26/maryland-woman-boy-body-swing

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Authorities in La Plata, Maryland, are trying to determine how a three-year-old boy died, after his mother was found pushing his dead body in a swing in a playground last week.

Officers responded to the scene after a resident phoned them to say that a young woman had been pushing a toddler in a swing “for an unusually long period of time”.

When officers arrived at the scene of the playground shortly before 7am on Friday, they found the toddler’s mother pushing him in the swing. Their first instinct was to administer CPR to the child as “it was clear something was wrong”, Diane Richardson, a spokesperson for the Charles County sheriff’s office, said.

But they almost immediately realized he was dead, and had been “for quite some time”, Richardson said.

Officials said it was possible the woman and her child had been at the park since the day before.

There were no obvious signs of trauma, the local sheriff’s office said, and results from an autopsy conducted over the weekend in Baltimore have so far been inconclusive, pending the return of toxicology tests, among other results, Richardson said.

The sheriff’s office is seeking to establish a timeline for the days leading up to the child’s death, Richardson said. Investigators have already heard from a lot of people, she said, and were calling on anyone with any relevant information to come forward.

On Monday, a woman claiming she was the deceased toddler’s grandmother came forward to a local television station and said her daughter had been diagnosed with a mental illness three months earlier.

The 24-year-old mother, who was brought into hospital Friday, was homeless and battling depression, the reported grandmother, Vontasha Simms, said.

“She would never, ever harm my grandson in any type of way,” Simms said.

La Plata is a small residential town of just over 9,000 residents one hour’s drive south of Washington DC.

The town is predominantly middle-class, with a homeownership rate of almost 75%, well above the national rate of 64%, but 10% of the town lives below the poverty line, national census figures show.

Richardson says she wouldn’t describe the mother and her son’s situation as homeless, as much as they were “in between addresses”. Vontasha Simms, the alleged grandmother, said they were living out of a hotel.

Wills Memorial Park, where the mother and her son were found, is “a small park, nestled in a neighborhood, surrounded by homes and roadways in a quiet community”, Richardson said.

The mother was still believed to be in hospital Tuesday.

“We are doing our best to uncover the sequence of events and find out what happened,” Richardson said.